Sex work stigma and the recuperation of moral personhood through gendered labour: sex worker diaries in Ukraine

Abstract

Based on a diary writing exercise, this paper illuminates the complex ways in which sex workers in Ukraine actively work through and manage stigma in their daily lives. Pushing beyond the notion of stigma as a static and fixed psychosocial designation that can be readily measured, we argue that stigma is actively confronted by sex workers through various forms of gendered emotional and physical labour that enable them to recuperate a sense of moral personhood. This notion of moral personhood is often tied to wider gender-specific values pertaining to caregiving and motherhood.

Keywords:

• Ukraine
• sex work
• stigma
• gender
• conflict

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Dynamics Study Team including the authors of this manuscript, as well as Sevgi Aral, James Blanchard, Tetiana Bondar, Eve Cheuk, Francois Cholette, Christina Daniuk, Evelyn Forget, Shajy Isac, Emma Lee, Huiting Ma, Leigh M. McClarty, Lyle McKinnon, Sharmistha Mishra, Stephen Moses, Nam-Mykhailo Nguien, Michael Pickles, Paul Sandstrom and Ani Shakarishvili for their work on the study. We would also like to thank the field research team and Road to Life and DEF Group (Dnipro) for their support. The work described here was conducted in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute for Social Research after Oleksandr Yaremenko (UISR after O.Yaremenko), the Alliance for Public Health in Ukraine, the Dnipro Oblast AIDS Centre and the Center for Public Health, the Ministry of Health in Ukraine.

Notes

1 i.e. a street, highway or park.

2 Anti-Terrorist Operation, a term used between 2014 and 2018 to refer to the Ukrainian military operation against pro-Russian separatists and Russian military forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine.

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (Reference Number PJT-148876). This funding source had no role to play in the design of the study or in the collection, analysis or interpretation of the data. Robert Lorway was supported by a Canada Research Chair.